For me there's a spiritual element to it too. Some people just "get ideas from somewhere".
The more ideas you have, the more you get. I expressly try to have ideas and combine different things or inspirations together.
I use "writing is thinking" to develop ideas, I've been journalling ideas since 2013 and they're all computer software related. I am up to 700 entries. Links are in my profile.
I also publish submit ideas on halfbakery.com under the user chronological.
One thing I learned recently though is that to follow through with an idea requires 100s of skills. I don't want to get stuck in a local optimum of trying to create say, a perfect piece of futuristic piece of software perfectly or a new programming language perfectly on first try. I need to just go out and do stuff and explore by doing things with my ideas. Sure I'll have digressions where I explore an interesting idea, but the important thing is I try to keep doing different tasks that get me nearer the ideas' aims.
Good comment, I've been struggling with the "100s of skills" thing a bit recently. I have a small side project I've been working on but have somewhat stalled as I keep running up against the limits of what I already know. The only solution to this is to just keep grinding and trying new things as I keep trying to build the thing, but the loss of momentum every time I find the next brick wall is demotivating.
Anyway, I'm currently procrastinating on that exact side project (I try to sit down and put an hour in on it at least once a day).
My project is a Phoenix app, and the thing that's been stalling me lately is that the feature I'm working on seemed like a good candidate to be built with Liveview, which I have almost no experience with. The screen in question is where a user can put together a routine from their exercises (it's an app for organizing your practice routine for a musical instrument).
I want users to be able to drag and drop the exercises they add to a routine into their preferred order. So I spent my hour and change today reading through the 4th chapter of the LiveView book and then hooked up a live route to a page in my app.
As of right now it's not even close to done, but I do have a basic scaffold in place now, and I started putting together a basic HTML page in another file to experiment with the look and feel of the thing.
I'm not much of a frontend guy so another stumbling block has just been trying to piece together things that look halfway decent. Phoenix 1.7 ships with Tailwind so I've also been trying to wrap my head around that.
It wasn't all that much really, but I'm one step further along, and hopefully have a little less friction for the next session.
So far, I've clocked 12 hours on the project, with a goal of putting in 162 hours over the next few months (to match the amount of time I spent playing Factorio last year). 12 hours doesn't feel like that much to me, but I've learned a good amount about Phoenix so far. A lot of the first few hours was spent learning about Ecto (the main Elixir/Phoenix database framework).
Anyway, it's often frustrating - I want to be at the point where I can just sit down with an idea and make it happen. But it does feel good to "put the reps in," and hopefully the time I'm investing will pay off in a more accessible set of skills.
Wow - that sounds really interesting. Well done for persevering :-)
I think LiveView is a really interesting idea and can be extremely powerful to building responsive applications.
I've always wondered how LiveView scales when you add a load balancer to the mix and what you need to do to cause it to work at scale.
I'm not much of a frontend (css/html) person either!
I just set myself a task and work until it's done, it's not part of an overreaching project but sometimes they do join up together and I merge the work together.
> I just set myself a task and work until it's done, it's not part of an overreaching project
I wanted to add something in response to this bit - I have, for most of my dev career, tended to avoid doing big projects when I'm playing around on the side. I have, for example, completed one year of Advent of Code, done quite a few puzzles from other years, and done lots of little one-off things like that.
The current project has been interesting because it's forcing me to take a bigger picture view and grapple with the difficulties of integrating lots of different modules together into something cohesive. As I get closer to releasing something, I'll also have to figure out some things I've never done before - how to accept payments, set up an LLC, and so on and so forth.
I've been repeatedly telling myself that even if I never have a single paying user (well, besides myself), that the knowledge I gain by going from an empty text file to an actual "business entity" capable of accepting a payment for a service will be worth a lot as I continue my career. Truly "full stack", you could say.
> I wanted to add something in response to this bit - I have, for most of my dev career, tended to avoid doing big projects when I'm playing around on the side. I have, for example, completed one year of Advent of Code, done quite a few puzzles from other years, and done lots of little one-off things like that.
Whenever I set myself a large project and prepare to undertake something large, my motivation to work on it changes and I start wanting to do other things.
But when I just commit to do a small task of part of something large I feel I can do anything I want. I just need to get the small task done. You can scale a mountain doing a little part at a time.
Scaling doesn't seem likely to be a major concern in my case, although it's definitely worth thinking about. I do eventually plan to release this thing to the public though. I guess if I end up with enough users to need to worry about any kind of scale, that would be a good problem to have!
I like to think that this comes from an attitude of recognising ideas as they emerge, and being willing to tolerate seemingly bad ones, chewing on them a bit until they either get better or are recognized as ones worth dropping.
I think most people are afraid to acknowledge their ideas, or at least afraid to let them out
“Too much imagination is much rarer than too little; when it occurs, it usually involves its unfortunate possessor in frustration and failure-unless he is sensible enough merely to write about his ideas, and not to attempt their realization.”
"Some companies have "skunk works" - secure, secret laboratories for their highly creative staff where they can freely experiment without disrupting the daily business."
Smoking Skunk weed does this to the brain as well, which is perhaps a stealth reference to skunk works.
Main property of Skunk weed is, extremely high levels of THC and low levels of CBD.
Psychosis is also seen in pregnant women or post partum due to the strain on their body. If ever you wanted an example look no further than Ridley Scott's Alien Chestburster destroying the host or even this https://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbywolves/comments/j5ky8t/ridl...
So what does Psychosis tell us? Its a brain immunological issue. Clues from the Skunk THC:CBD ratio.
Neutrophil's are the first (innate) immune cell response to be recruited to sites of inflammation in order to engulf pathogens. The increased size of neutrophils helps to engulf larger pathogens, including bacteria biofilms which will plague people towards end of life.
Omega-3's are a precursor to endocannabinoids aka the phyto CBD seen in weed and other food sources.
Hence why the military have developed skunk, you get a double whammy punishment of breaking the law whilst also being psychologically cracked in order to give up secrets for law enforcement purposes via medical centres, like something out of a MK Ultra mind control programme adapted and coerced on the wider population today.
The more ideas you have, the more you get. I expressly try to have ideas and combine different things or inspirations together.
I use "writing is thinking" to develop ideas, I've been journalling ideas since 2013 and they're all computer software related. I am up to 700 entries. Links are in my profile.
I also publish submit ideas on halfbakery.com under the user chronological.
One thing I learned recently though is that to follow through with an idea requires 100s of skills. I don't want to get stuck in a local optimum of trying to create say, a perfect piece of futuristic piece of software perfectly or a new programming language perfectly on first try. I need to just go out and do stuff and explore by doing things with my ideas. Sure I'll have digressions where I explore an interesting idea, but the important thing is I try to keep doing different tasks that get me nearer the ideas' aims.